Against The Carports And The Misspelled Hotels Poem by Robert Rorabeck

They will make a sound at the doorstops of your
Castles, even if you never drive this way—
This is how it will turn out:
You will get around the end of my old neighborhood,
And collapse next to the antlers of a chinaberry
Tree,
And then say to all of the forgotten woods that it not
Alright to be here,
And the blue gills will burp and hiccup in the canal—
And all of the children will seem to move
Sideways in the canals of their high schools—
And their mutual bereavements will continue to
Pretend to be so unreal—
And maybe you will find her past out one night while on
A delivery:
Maybe she will be collapsed next to a watermelon in
Her negligee:
Maybe she will have collapsed in the middle of a game of
Battleship,
And in her dreams made it halfway up to State College
Where she inevitably messed around and
Played with herself—until the summer came,
And all of the sororities rode white ponies and continued
To gesticulate to their continually pregnant grandmothers
Who were still luxuriating in their confederacies—
But, otherwise—the moon got out early and shone over
The hallucinations where the busses were turning around,
And you spied them like an eagle, like an osprey,
Until your true love got out of one of them—
And she touched the ground herself—and disappeared like
An angel in a sea of burning promises—
The fuses disappearing into the maelstroms that consume
All of the bones of the wayward marionettes—
As they still struggle upwards from the sea—delighting in
The nocturnal perfumes the lighthouses have bought and
Sold to them, giving them the vanishing luxury
As the sea swells against the car ports and the misspelled hotels
That become so filled that only the virgins of the streets
Are allowed to enter in.